Aggressiveness Girls often wear trousers at school

Aggressive behavior is usually attributed to boys, while girls are considered calmer. However, a study by the University of Potsdam shows that the level of aggression in the classroom is largely determined by the girls. The psychologists Robert Busching and Barbara Krahé interviewed a total of 1,300 Berlin students about their attitude towards aggressive behavior. If the girls in a class had a more open attitude towards violence, the class behaved more aggressively.

Classroom norm influences aggressive behavior of each student
Over the course of three years, psychologists have studied how the class norm, that is, the attitude of a class towards aggression, is influenced. The interviews started with the students in the seventh and eighth grade. Every girl and every boy should use a fictitious story to explain what their own reaction to provocative behavior would look like. Aggressive behavior they could specify in three grades - pushing, kicking and biting. The more aggressively the student described his reaction in the story, the higher his tolerance for violence. Accordingly, its value was high on the scale of attitudes to aggression. In addition, the students were asked about the aggressive behavior that they had actually shown in the last six months. After completion of the surveys, the researchers formed the mean of the scale values, which corresponds to the class standard.

As it turned out, the class norm affects the aggression of each student. When majority violence was accepted in a class, students also showed more aggressive behavior than in classes where aggression was less tolerated - even though the individual student had a very different attitude. As particularly striking the researchers called the influence of girls in the class. If they found aggressive behavior to be mostly acceptable, the entire class behaved more aggressively.

The psychologists suspect that girls are much more similar to each other in their attitudes than boys. Therefore, their direct influence in the class is greater. "The results show the dampening effect of social norms on the way from individual normative convictions to aggressive behavior in adolescence", write the researchers in the journal "Personality and Social Psychology". (Ag)

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